When Ang Lee (李安) was casting the female lead in his World War II sex and espionage melodrama, Lust, Caution (色戒), he gave his assistant director the gnomic instruction, "What others don't want, I'll take." The assistant director understood: "No oval face, no big-eyed Barbie, no long-limbed, willowy mannequin."
Tang Wei (湯唯), a rising television star who won the part over more famous competitors, is none of those pretty things. She's better: the sort of deeply expressive actress who can look ordinary one moment and utterly captivating the next.
Lust, Caution gives her ample opportunity and, in a performance of astonishing passion and complexity, she makes the most of it. As part of an assassination plot by a student resistance group in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, Tang's Wang Jia-zhi (王佳芝) goes undercover to seduce the government's extremely dangerous intelligence chief, played by the charismatic superstar Tony Leung (梁朝偉) (2046, Infernal Affairs, 無間道).
PHOTO: AP
Wang's transformation from idealistic bluestocking to bombshell seductress is the sort of trope that spy movies thrive on. But Tang makes it much more powerful - both an ordeal and an awakening - and so nakedly intimate that it becomes the central drama of the film.
The visual contrast between Tang's plain, somewhat artless activist and chic, red-lipped coquette is so startling that it signals how radical her transformation is. The spontaneous sparks between her sexually inexperienced student and Leung's cynical spy combust unexpectedly into a love affair raw enough to earn the movie an NC-17 rating, and sufficiently fierce and consuming that for Wang, at least, it amounts to a fiery furnace. Tang expresses the toll this takes with subtle ingenuity, as the two characters she's playing begin to fuse, Wang's submissiveness dissolving along with her idealism and the seductress' coquetry giving way to something more urgent and disturbing.
Perhaps Tang's most electrifying moment in a movie full of them arrives when Wang's reports back to her male handlers and, in the most graphic terms possible, tells them just what carrying out their mission is doing to her, the intimacy of it and the corruption. They look stunned, as well they might. Their obedient comrade has become something great and terrible, an outraged, anguished woman belching fire even as, internally, she goes down in flames.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
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April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist